1 comment:

Tiny Tom
said...

Howdy BB,

Well I was gonna Trackback to that fine post by Fixin' Supper but it looks like you beat me to it. :) Just repeating my own thoughts on it below from FS's blog:

Out in Arizona where I'm from, especially around Phoenix, any business owner who signs onto the "English-only" bandwagon is just about guaranteed to go broke in, oh, 2 weeks-- tops. Out there in the SW, the Hispanics were the founders of the towns and cities, and framed the legal and administrative landscape in its earliest form, prior to the incredibly bloody Mexican-American War of the middle of the 19th century through which the US got control of the Mexican territory (including Arizona of course, also California, NM, and a few other states).

A bunch of treaties and statutes and accumulated common law practices evolved in a Spanish-English dual tradition in these regions. So out there, Spanish really *is* a common language side-by-side and right up there with English, to be used in offices, schools, voting booths, any other public place. (Native American languages also enjoy that status-- in fact, as was explained to me in one of my college poli sci classes, American law accords special status to "founders' languages" like the native American tongues, English and Spanish that were established in land incorporated into the US by annexation, as opposed to purely outside immigrant languages. Spanish is one of the founders' languages in about 36% of the nation.)

It's a good idea to know Spanish in just about any big American urban center these days, but in the SW portion of the country (not to mention in Miami) it's just about mandatory for anyone who wants to do business. In fact, it's basically a necesesary job skill in that part of the nation.